Benign ecology: Marietta Pallis and the floating fen of the delta of the Danube,1912-1916

This paper considers the work of the ecologist Marietta Pallis (1882-1963), retracing the fieldwork associated with her 1916 paper on ‘The structure and history of Plav’, the floating fen of the Danube delta. Attending to links between field and home, politics and ecology, the paper explores how field cultures are implicated in the mutual and imaginative constitution of nature and society. The paper examines the scientific culture within which Pallis operated, and the wider cultures of travel and identity within which her scientific fieldwork took place. Fieldwork was facilitated and shaped by a range of encounters with officials and informants whose presence is variously engaged with and erased in Pallis’s published account. We emphasize Pallis’s understanding of Plav as a ‘benign’ form of ecology, highlighting the political complexity of that term, and of the vitalism espoused by Pallis as part of her conservative eco-philosophical imagination.